Filed under: Terminal Tips
Terminal Tip: Four ways to turn off Finder animations and speed up your system
Mac OS X Hints has posted several ways to disable Finder animations like the snap-to-grid animation and the Info window opening animation. They are:
1. Disable standard Finder animations.
defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true
2. Disable 'snap to grid'.
defaults Write com.apple.Finder AnimateSnapToGrid -bool FALSE
3. Disable Info pane animations
defaults write com.apple.finder AnimateInfoPanes -bool false
4. Disable slow-mo animations (seen when you press Shift during Exposé launches or window minimization)
defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableSlowAnimation -bool true
Issue any or all of these at the command line, and then restart Finder. (Enter killall "Finder" at the command line.) To reverse these effects, change from true to false or false to true and restart Finder again. So did this make my creaky 733 G4 Power PC Mac run faster? Perhaps a little. The biggest changes in speed I noticed were in accessing folders from the dock.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kevin Little said 8:20PM on 5-21-2007
Thanks these tips sped up my system more than expected.
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derek said 10:06PM on 5-21-2007
if you need to disable this stuff to speed up finder.. you either need more RAM or a new Mac
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Fernando said 10:16PM on 5-21-2007
I need a new Mac...
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Kostas said 9:43AM on 5-22-2007
Nice tips, especially the one with the slow-mo animations. I have a shortcut conflict with the combination Shift + F11 when I work with Quark XPress. In Quark this is the shortcut to the Style Sheets panel but it's not functionable in Tiger because of Expose. Sadly I tried the command line that you suggest but it didn't desable it. I can't figure out why...
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systimax said 11:39AM on 5-22-2007
Really Derek? Are you sure? Oh wait your uninformed and apply your thoughts to everyone else.
How about those who use vnc over SSH tunneling, with all the ssh compression and VNC settings these tips help alot with VNC speed.
Another tip is to use Nocturne from the Quicksilver author to drop all colors for us that have the latest macs and plenty of RAM
To each his/her own
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Paulpro said 11:55AM on 5-22-2007
If you want to speed up performance of the Finder and other apps, use ShadowKiller from Unsanity. Removing shadows from all windows tends to make a big difference in the perceived responsiveness of your system.
http://unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller
It's a Universal binary, so it will run on both PPC and Intel Macs.
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pedro said 12:41PM on 5-22-2007
TinkerTool will give you a GUI to disable most of these effects - made 10.4 usable on a Pismo 400mhz (meaning, less slow).
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Drew Lustro said 3:28PM on 5-22-2007
This tip is retarded.
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iDarbert said 9:03AM on 5-27-2007
Apple should let users disable the animations from System/Finder Preferences, a-la Windows Control Panel.
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